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DM186

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They are both good and bad. They are mostly good. Since AMD has out the 7xxx series that puts them on top and when the Kepler, the Nvidia 6xx series comes out then it will be neck and neck again

Now before the AMD 7xxx series came out Nvidia had the better card on the upper end where as AMD had more cards to choose from and they were better on the lower end. What it boiles down to is the user's preference.

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/graphics-cards/amd-vs-nvidia-who-makes-the-best-graphics-cards--699480
 

jk47

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A BIG factor others rarely mention, is driver support.

Nvidia is incredible with their updates. Sometimes before games are even released, Nvidia has beta drivers to enable SLI for the game, give a 3D rating, and/or boost performance with the actual driver update. e.g. "... Up to 11% performance increase in Diablo III with SLI".

I think right after Skyrim was released, Nvidia had a beta driver which helped some graphics issues, and allowed for SLI. It took AMD at least a couple weeks for their corresponding driver update.

Overall when I had a 6950, I found AMD driver update frequency to be crap
 



This is defiantly the best way to go.
It really depends on what you want from the card.
If you just want the fastest card for your budget for gaming then check reviews to see if one makers card is clearly better for your games and if there is no real difference just buy the best deal regardless of who makes it.

For HTPC duties watching films etc I have always favoured AMD cards

If you want PhysX or use encoding software that can take advantage of CUDA technology then it has to be an Nvidia card.

Mactronix :)
 


I can recall an article from a couple of years ago where it was mentioned that AMD drivers could be problematic when it came to setting up Crossfire.
 

jk47

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In my personal GPU history, I've jumped back and forth from Nvidia to AMD. Most recently from a 6950, now to a GTX 590. With my 6950 there would be months at a time without any kind of updated driver support.

While Tom's may not have mentioned it in reviews, I can say with certainty Nvidia blows AMD out of the water with drivers. Frequent driver updates are very important for the hardware to optimize it's performance for new releases.



An unrelated note, Nvidia has overall better 3D performance in more games. Nvidia 3d utilises SLI, whereas AMD 3D can not utilise CF. This is an important difference, as 3D is much more taxing on graphics performance. On the other hand, AMD offers flexibility in screens, 3D glasses.
 

jryan388

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One thing that I've noticed is that nVidia gives a few more features besides performance. Specifically, I have wanted to use CUDA apps and have not been able to because my card is AMD, and nVidia has free drivers for running games on 3d monitors, but you have to buy the driver separately for AMD cards.
 

sykozis

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AMD releases at LEAST 1 driver a month.....nVidia's driver updates have been very infrequent over the last 2-3 years.
 
This is an interesting quote from the conclusion of the HardOCP review of the 7950:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/01/30/amd_radeon_hd_7950_video_card_review/15

Quote:
Troubled Games and CrossFireX
AMD still has its work cut out with CrossFireX drivers. We've encountered two games here that do not seem to do well with Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX. Batman was the worse, the performance was unusually slow with Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX, possibly indicating immature drivers for a game that was released in November of 2011. Skyrim also performed rather poorly in comparison, also a title released in November of last year. NVIDIA has a leg up on AMD with Skyrim multi-GPU performance. Of course, NVIDIA also had SLI support for Skyrim months before AMD had any CrossFireX support in the game.

There is always an aspect of gameplay performance that is hard to relate to gamers through a graph, or even words. We are talking about physically "feeling" a game as you play it. What people perceive as playable performance is not always attached to framerate. This seems to be a fact of CrossFireX that we've encountered in our gameplay testing. At times, the framerate being displayed on the screen doesn't match what we are "feeling" as we play the game.

For example, if 40 or 50 FPS is indicated, even though that should be playable since its above 30 FPS it won't necessarily feel playable. We have to shoot for higher FPS. We experience some kind of lag or choppiness in gameplay with CrossFireX even though the framerate indicates it should be playable. This means you cannot always rely on framerate alone to determine playable performance.

This is a difference that separates CrossFireX from SLI. With SLI we do not experience this phenomenon as much. With SLI, framerates seem smoother at lower framerates, than these do with CrossFireX. For example, we often find we need to aim for higher framerates in order for CrossFireX to feel like it’s playable. Whereas, with SLI we often find we can settle with lower framerates, because it feels playable at those framerates. Trust us, we do not go by framerates when evaluating how these cards actually game. The framerates lie.

Some of this can be seen in the graphs, when we talk about consistency. We've shown it in this evaluation, look back at the Deus Ex or Skyrim graphs and you will see SLI producing a more consistent framerate. These are just facts between CrossFireX and SLI, but it makes it so that SLI feels smoother and better to us, than CrossFireX does often. This was the case a lot of the time testing Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX versus GeForce GTX 580 SLI. We just felt GeForce GTX 580 SLI offered a smoother experience, in pretty much every game, even the ones where Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX allowed higher in-game settings.
 

So what, using a unified driver and being 'ready' for release one would think that AMD would have at least tested the darn thing before selling it.
 
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